Mon Sep 25 23:09:45 CEST 2006

GKrellM vs. Conky

Today I fired WindowMaker and installed fluxbox which is based on blackbox. Then I thought about
which program I should use to watch my system activities.
There are two choices currently: GKrellM
or Conky.

GKrellM (GNU/GTK Krell Monitors/Meters) uses the GIMP Toolkit,
so it needs some more system resources. It has got a fancy configuration window where you can edit everything on
your own with one click. Because it's in its own window you can display it above all others - nice option.

Conky is a small monitor which uses some command line tools and some X libs. It can display itself
to the root window or can also be run in windowed mode or write to stdout
(conky FAQ). The configuration is handled
by ~/.conkyrc. It's not very complicated
but very complex - you should have a look at some
screenshots and modify their configurations to fit your imaginations.
The Gentoo Conky Howto is also a good point to start.

In the end Conky is very flexible and very configurable but because it's defaultly in the root window
makes it unsympathic. GKrellM is very static and somehow unflexible. But I prefer Conky
nevertheless because of its possibility to display huge information at once.